Moblin Linux on x86 smartphone: Intel’s small step forward

Intel has unveiled a new LG smartphone built on Moorestown that runs the …

During a press briefing at CES on Thursday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini revealed the LG GW990, a Moorestown-powered smartphone that runs Intel's Linux-based Moblin operating system. The product is expected to arrive on the market in the second half of this year.

When Intel lifted the curtain on Moorestown last year, the company contended that it would finally make it possible to bring the x86 architecture to smartphones. The claim seemed somewhat fantastical, but now Intel and LG could potentially deliver on that promise. Moorestown is said to be considerably more energy efficient than Intel's previous Atom offerings, but it's still not totally clear what kind of battery life we can expect to get from devices like the GW990 in real-world usage scenarios. LG says that the product has a 1850mAh battery and can endure five hours of 3G browsing on a single charge.

In some respects, the GW990—which has an impressive high-resolution 4.8-inch touchscreen display—seems more like a MID than a smartphone. It's possible that we won't see x86 phones with truly competitive all-day battery life until the emergence of Medfield, the Moorestown successor that is said to be coming in 2011. It is clear, however, that Intel aims to eventually compete squarely with ARM in the high-end smartphone market.

Intel originally launched the Moblin project in 2007 with the goal of creating an Atom-optimized Linux platform for MIDs. The focus shifted to netbooks when the company started work on Moblin 2, which began shipping on actual hardware last year.

Some of Moblin's underlying components have great potential for facilitating rich smartphone application development, particularly the open source Clutter scene graph framework, which is used to build the Moblin user interface. Clutter—which was created by OpenedHand, a startup that Intel acquired in 2008—has been shown to be well-suited for building touschreen user interfaces. Although it's not yet known whether Clutter is used on the GW990, it seems likely.

The GW990 will be Moblin's first real test running on a smartphone form factor, but the platform is becoming an increasingly desirable choice on netbooks. Samsung had a large number of netbooks on display at CES, but its N127—running Novell's SUSE-based variant of Moblin—really stood out. Moblin's snappy and visually refined user interface is impressive and demonstrates the value that Linux can bring to the netbook market. It's more responsive than Windows XP on the same hardware and it can clearly be customized with a look and feel that is better-suited for small screens.

Although Moblin has a lot of potential, it still suffers from some weaknesses and limitations. When we conducted extensive hands-on testing of Moblin 2 on the Dell Mini 10v back in October, the quality of the user experience was undermined by the platform's incompleteness and lack of stability relative to other Linux-based netbook platforms.

Power management is still a major challenge, even though Intel is working on a number of ongoing projects to boost Moblin's energy efficiency. The Novell engineers we spoke to at CES told us that the Moblin version of the N127 is at battery life parity with the Windows XP version (which means that a future Windows 7 version would likely do better still)

Another impediment for Moblin are the unanswered questions about the extent to which Intel will support the platform. Intel hasn't been particularly responsive to concerns expressed by the Linux development community regarding the lack of proper Linux drivers for the GMA500, an integrated graphics component that Intel sold to many netbook makers.

During the Intel briefing, Otellini cited Nokia as its other major hardware partner for Moorestown smartphone action. As some readers may recall, Intel and Nokia announced a partnership last year to collaborate on Mobile Linux development. They have been working on a shared open source telephony stack for Linux called oPhono, but they haven't had much to say publicly about what kind of hardware they were planning to build together. Now Intel has confirmed that Nokia is on board for Moorestown.

The GW990 is an impressive step forward for Intel's vision of bringing x86 everywhere. The extent of its viability for real-world smartphone devices still remains to be seen. Engadget, which got some hands-on time with the LG GW990, found some evidence that it could potentially be headed to AT&T when it launches later this year.

I'm reminded of how when desktops first started hitting the market in the stone-age of computing back in the late 70's / early 80's. Seemed everyone was integrating the screens & keyboards in with the processing unit.

Then someone got the bright idea to separate out the interfaces from the processing unit, so folks could interchange them as they saw fit.

They need to hurry up and do that with mobile devices.

Your mobile processing unit should be something the size of a credit card you stuff in your wallet. It handles all the cpu processing, graphics processing, wireless/internet, and all the other crap our desktops handle at home.

Your mobile screen would be something like an e-book reader, which could itself supply a more robust graphics processor for gaming if that's what you do. It could have stylus input, virtual keyboard, or it could just be a screen you use with a wireless keyboard separately.

By separating them out, you could then swap them out as you upgraded. And, they should make these mobile processing units self-upgradeable, from a software and hardware stand-point. (Edit: when I say "self-upgradeable", I mean where you the user can upgrade it without having to scrap the whole device and buy a new one. One of the biggest annoyances with PDA's was not being able to upgrade their OS without flashing in some cooked rom from some dev kit-bashing things together in their studio. Likewise, many old pda's which are still perfectly functional can no longer get flashed if you've moved on to Win Vista/7, because they only want to work with WinXP Active Sync, not Win Vista/7 Mobile Device Center. If they expect us to pay $500+ for a mobile device, then the companies producing them shoudl treat it like more than some throw-away toy.)

Why oh why are they trying to put an x86 processor into a cell phone? Anyone with half a brain knows that the x86 architecture, with all of its extra instruction sets (SSE 1-4, MMX, AMD3D Now!, etc), is one of the worst choices for mobile computing due to its overly complex architecture and power requirements. Heck, x86 isn't all that great even for the desktop, but we have so much software and hardware dependent on it that we cannot really change it now.

Stay with something simple with an ARM-based processor. They tend to have a fairly simple architecture with smaller power requirements.

Originally posted by chronomitch:Why oh why are they trying to put an x86 processor into a cell phone? Anyone with half a brain knows that the x86 architecture, with all of its extra instruction sets (SSE 1-4, MMX, AMD3D Now!, etc), is one of the worst choices for mobile computing due to its overly complex architecture and power requirements. Heck, x86 isn't all that great even for the desktop, but we have so much software and hardware dependent on it that we cannot really change it now.

Stay with something simple with an ARM-based processor. They tend to have a fairly simple architecture with smaller power requirements.

While I agree with you, this is what happens when one corporation has billions to spend on R&D and has the best fabs in the world. x86 sucked from day one, until after cornering the market with Microsoft made all those billions and now is making a good CPU. Just like Microsoft who's only solution to many of the problems was to throw a copy of Windows at it, or Intel throwing x86 at graphics and now portable stuff.

Originally posted by chronomitch:Why oh why are they trying to put an x86 processor into a cell phone? Anyone with half a brain knows that the x86 architecture, with all of its extra instruction sets (SSE 1-4, MMX, AMD3D Now!, etc), is one of the worst choices for mobile computing due to its overly complex architecture and power requirements. Heck, x86 isn't all that great even for the desktop, but we have so much software and hardware dependent on it that we cannot really change it now.

Stay with something simple with an ARM-based processor. They tend to have a fairly simple architecture with smaller power requirements.

Originally posted by chronomitch:Why oh why are they trying to put an x86 processor into a cell phone? Anyone with half a brain knows that the x86 architecture, with all of its extra instruction sets (SSE 1-4, MMX, AMD3D Now!, etc), is one of the worst choices for mobile computing due to its overly complex architecture and power requirements. Heck, x86 isn't all that great even for the desktop, but we have so much software and hardware dependent on it that we cannot really change it now.

Stay with something simple with an ARM-based processor. They tend to have a fairly simple architecture with smaller power requirements.

Because they stand to make millions of dollars if it succeeds?

Why doesn't Intel just make an ARM-based processor for cell phones? It would be far better than trying to shoehorn a power-hungry and complicated x86 design into a cell phone.

Intellectual Property. Intel has a lot IP tied into x86. For ARM (or Cell, or etc...), they would either have to buy licenses or develop from scratch for millions in R&D. Also, following Moore's Law, the extra overhead from x86 designs should become negligible in a generation or two. By the way, the reason for connecting the keyboards and monitors made sense at the time. Companies didn't want to give away profits for separate peripherals to other companies. Different companies had to negotiate on standards. This is harder to appreciate since USB, but, companies like Apple made extra money from keyboards, when theirs on Macs were ADB, and IBM "clones" were either PS/2 or older 5-pin DIN. Plans like these don't just effect a single generation of tech, but several generations for years to come, and very large amounts of money.

Android can be one or another. The way the environment is designed it uses a byte format for applications similar to what is used for Java or Microsoft's .NET. Meaning that if you write a application for Android then it should be able to run on anything running that version of Android.

It's just that ARM is simply the most superior platform for these sorts of thing. In terms of performance per cost and performance per energy usage the modern ARM platforms can easily blow any sort of Intel processor away.

The CPU in your iPhone will use less energy during normal use then the Atom does idling in power save mode.

Intel will continue to improve though. Intel is a monster and if anybody can make the obsolete and inefficient x86 design work on handhelds then Intel can. X86 is a significant burden. ARM being a RISC-style design they can provide more performance with less. Meanwhile Intel has to have all sorts of logic and extra transistors to translate the old x86 stuff to the modern CPU cores that they use.

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The reason why you'd want to use Moblin instead of Android is because traditional Linux is massively more capable and full featured then Android currently is. Android is fine for smartphones and such, but Moblin is based around normal Linux and Gnome desktop environments.. just optimized to be consumer friendly. The sort of stuff that Intel is doing (And Nokia with their N900 phone) is ending up in Gnome and much of it will be integrated into the 'Gnome 3.0' release concept.

That is not to say that Android won't some day be as full featured and capable. Right now pretty much all smartphone OS suck to such a degree that people's expectations are very low. So things like the iPhone and Android are impressive.

Also I am not saying that Android being limited is user-unfriendly. Certainly Android is very easy to do and to develop for. So when comparing Android versus Moblin keep in mind that your comparing Ease-of-use versus Powerful/features.

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BTW Intel has done ARM in the past.

They purchased the 'StrongArm' platform and produced the 'Xscale' series of processors. These are insanely popular for many embedded applications due to the performance that they offer. Pretty much all the 'soho' routers use Xscale, for example.

The problem is that they traded to much for clock rate for efficiency so you didn't see them to much except in high end stuff. The 600mhz Intel Xscale is not really going to be substantially faster then a 200mhz ARM9 system for most handheld stuff, but it uses a lot more energy.

They sold the Xscale stuff to Freescale. Freescale, btw, is the maker of the system-on-the-chip that forms the basis for Google's new Nexus One phone. This hardware is currently faster then the Texas Instrument OMAP3 stuff used in the Motorola Droid and the newer Apple IPhones.

The Ti OMAP3 platform when combined with the C64x DSP processor is perfectly capable of decoding a 1080p H.264 stream WHILE transcoding it to MPEG2 or other formats and still have plenty of power left over. This level of performance for processing video streams blows away what I can do with similar stuff on my Core2Duo laptop with the GMA graphics processor. It's just a matter of doing custom programming to make the most of the hardware.

This is a rethorical question right? We are talking about the company that has an almost monopoly on Desktop/Laptop processors. Which has a technology that is x86 based. So you really want to know why they are trying to put this into cell phones, now that cell phones become ever more powerful and may even replace the PC for many users?

That is not to say that Android won't some day be as full featured and capable

??? The thing I love about the iPhone OS in contrast to something like Windows CE is that it is not as "full-featured". Which Gnome feature would you like to have on a smartphone?

It is definitely not the UI, what Apple got and Microsoft not is that you want a really simple UI with not too many but in exchange pretty big elements on a phone with a small screen.

So any ability to just use Desktop OS widgets, user interfaces whatever is not good but a harmful ability for developers to give up user experience by simply using for example the standard Email app, when the special smartphone version is not finished.

So apart from UI things which other features are we missing? I mean Maemo and the iPhone run some kind of Unix kernel so you should be able to recompile most non-ui stuff pretty easily.

Every moment when I hear full-featured when it is mentioned in the smart-phone area I get suspicious. The Desktop and smartphones are completely different areas. And IMO platforms like Android or the iPhone OS are at a strong advantage by completely targeting small-screen touch-screen devices.

Marvell, not Freescale. They didn't even sell all of it, Intel's IO Processors are dual-core ARM-based chips.

quote:

The thing I love about the iPhone OS in contrast to something like Windows CE is that it is not as "full-featured". Which Gnome feature would you like to have on a smartphone?

It's one thing to be "full featured" and have a terrible UI, and another to be full featured and have a good UI.

The problem I have with Android is multi-fold:- You _must_ use Java to have a GUI for software you develop.- Android's Dalvik VM doesn't comply with existing Java standards.- The default behavior, even for the Nexus One bought without a contract, is to lock you out of the device.

Only question will be if LG/Intel will be like Nokia, and put both the XTerminal and quick local root access a couple clicks away or if they'll go the Android/iPhone route where you have to wrestle control of your property out of their hands via subterfuge.

Mind you, until the N900 came along Android was probably going to be on my next smartphone.

Java is nice? Since you need a specialized UI API anyway what does it matter to you in what language it is written? The important questions are how nice the widgets are, how flexible the API is etc. pp. no?

The thing I love about the iPhone OS in contrast to something like Windows CE is that it is not as "full-featured". Which Gnome feature would you like to have on a smartphone?

It's one thing to be "full featured" and have a terrible UI, and another to be full featured and have a good UI.

Moblin is pretty slick. And it's using pretty much the same stuff as Nokia's N900 (the next Maemo OS is going to be switching to QT4, though).

The deal is that both Google and Apple are very good at creating user interfaces. This is a talent and they obviously both have good techniques for developing UI and have very smart UI folks working for them. All of this is mostly independent of the underlining technology.. whether your basing your UI off of Cocoa/QT/GTK/Win32/Dalvik or whatever... all of them are perfectly capable to do what needs to be done to create excellent UI's. It just depends on who is doing the UI design.

quote:

- The default behavior, even for the Nexus One bought without a contract, is to lock you out of the device.

Yeah. They will have to fix that. It's acceptable on a smartphone since people are so used to much more horrible things on Cell phones, but if your aiming to be more general purpose you'll have to let the users do what they want if they really want it.

quote:

Only question will be if LG/Intel will be like Nokia, and put both the XTerminal and quick local root access a couple clicks away or if they'll go the Android/iPhone route where you have to wrestle control of your property out of their hands via subterfuge.

If you want to be able to purchase the phone with a 2-year contract so that your paying 200 dollars instead of 600-700 dollars for it then your screwed. There is no way in hell that the carriers are going to allow you to have that much control over your own device.

They view you as consumers and thus have no rights at all except the right to give them all your money. It is really quite disgusting how cell phone carriers treat their customers. That is what you get when the government (in this case specifically FCC) just hands out near-monopoly control over major regions of the USA to the highest bidder locking out all potential competition and eliminating any chance of competition from smaller more customer-focused companies.

If you want to have control out of the box the only chance you have is to buy full priced retail and even then it's iffy. However that way the handset manufacturers have much are much more free to do what they want. Such is the case of the N900.

It is really too bad that Google isn't taking the same approach as Nokia.

- The default behavior, even for the Nexus One bought without a contract, is to lock you out of the device.

Is it not just a case of plugging it in to your PC via USB and entering a single 'unlock device'-type command? I was lead to believe that HTC had made it even easier than on their previous Android phones (which could all be rooted with the help of the Internet and a little bit of technical knowledge).

Originally posted by StevoTheDevo:That's pretty monstrous for a phone!!

I'd like to see the pocket that's going to slip into!

haha

If Intel can deliver an efficient enough platform, it'll be great to be able to use the same apps and familiar interfaces that you use on your computers, on your phones. I think Moorestown is still made on 45nm, so a 32nm version will definitely be more power efficient.